As we mentioned in a previous article, Red Hat advocate Greg DeKoenigsberg claimed that due to the much larger amount of code it's contributed, Red Hat is a better open source citizen than Canonical, adding, "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization." A Computerworld blog retorts that that's no insult; and that marketing Linux could be just as important to the cause as contributing code. Updated

In spite of Red Hat's significant technological contributions to Linux in general, and the inroads they have made with Linux on servers, they never made much of a dent in the average Joe desktop market.

That, though, is where Canonical has focused its efforts, and made more progress than any other organization as far as I can tell -- including Novell/SuSE, Redhat, and various other distros.

SUSE/openSUSE and Mandrake/Mandriva focused on desktop Linux much before Ubuntu existed. True, not all their releases were perfect, but many were.
For me Ubuntu has meant nothing but bugs.
Heck, even Lindows/Linspire was a great "Joe User" distro (before going 'buntu)
Or Xandros.
Why did they die? Because Ubuntu taught people you don't have to pay for a Linux distro.
Personally I was more than happy to pay for good distros, like the great, unrivalled Libranet.

You are very right. One of the things that contributed to the end of paid distributions was Ubuntu. I was part of the very small Libranet team, and I always felt this was one of the reasons of Libranet's demise. It's hard to compete with a multi-millionaire who ships stacks of free CDs to anyone requesting it. Still, for many years after its demise, Libranet's installer and administration tools were far more user-friendly and useful than Ubuntu's counterparts. This was all written by two paid guys and managed by another paid guy. Of course, Ubuntu was not the only cause of Libranet's end, but certainly a contributing factor.

I feel very sorry for Mindriva and its users that it may have the same fate.